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Environmental fluctuations reshape an unexpected diversity-disturbance relationship in a microbial community

View ORCID ProfileChristopher P. Mancuso, Hyunseok Lee, Clare I. Abreu, View ORCID ProfileJeff Gore, View ORCID ProfileAhmad S. Khalil
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.28.225987
Christopher P. Mancuso
1Department of Biomedical Engineering and Biological Design Center, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA
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Hyunseok Lee
2Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
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Clare I. Abreu
2Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
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Jeff Gore
2Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
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Ahmad S. Khalil
1Department of Biomedical Engineering and Biological Design Center, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA
3Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02115, USA
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  • For correspondence: khalil@bu.edu
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Abstract

Environmental disturbances have long been theorized to shape the diversity and composition of ecosystems. However, fundamental limitations in our ability to specify the scale and features of a disturbance in the field and laboratory have produced an inconsistent picture of diversity-disturbance relationships (DDRs). Using a recently developed automated continuous culture system, we decomposed a dilution disturbance into intensity and fluctuation components, and tested their effects on diversity of a soil-derived bacterial community across hundreds of replicate cultures. We observed an unexpected U-shaped relationship between diversity and disturbance intensity in the absence of fluctuations, counter to classic intuition. Adding fluctuations erased the U-shape and increased community diversity across all disturbance intensities. All of these results are well-captured by a Monod consumer resource model, and can be explained by a novel “niche flip” mechanism wherein tradeoffs between species growth parameters produce coexistence regimes that collapse at intermediate disturbance levels. Our results illustrate that compositional complexity of an ecosystem can be generated and predictably reshaped using temporal environmental patterns, and highlight how distinct features of disturbance can interact in complex ways to govern ecosystem assembly.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.
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Posted July 29, 2020.
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Environmental fluctuations reshape an unexpected diversity-disturbance relationship in a microbial community
Christopher P. Mancuso, Hyunseok Lee, Clare I. Abreu, Jeff Gore, Ahmad S. Khalil
bioRxiv 2020.07.28.225987; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.28.225987
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Environmental fluctuations reshape an unexpected diversity-disturbance relationship in a microbial community
Christopher P. Mancuso, Hyunseok Lee, Clare I. Abreu, Jeff Gore, Ahmad S. Khalil
bioRxiv 2020.07.28.225987; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.28.225987

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